In the first few weeks of the new administration, Kissinger ordered the
Pentagon to present a highly classified briefing on bombing options available in
the Vietnam War. The task fell to Air Force Colonel Ray B. Sitton, an
experienced Strategic Air Command officer serving the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Sitton was known in the Pentagon as "Mr. B-52."

It was an unusual exercise, Sitton says. "I drew up a big list-on a board
about three feet high and eight or nine feet wide-of military steps you might
make that would signal North Vietnam that we meant business. Kissinger wanted
them to know that we were serious about possible escalation."

Nixon and Kissinger had found the right signal to send: By mid-March 1969
they would secretly begin bombing Cambodia with B-52s: aircraft, the
eight-engine jets that were the core of the strategic bombing fleet. The bombing
became a turning point not only in the war but also in the mentality of the
White House. The secret of that bombing-and hundreds of later missions- would be
kept for five years. Eventually, the secret became more important to the White
House than the bombing.

There was, in the Pentagon's view, a legitimate military reason to assault
Cambodia directly. Tens of thousands of North Vietnamese soldiers had
established bases and supply depots there and were using the sanctuaries as
jumping-off points for ground battles in South Vietnam, just across the border.
Somewhere in that area, too, was the Communist headquarters for the guerrilla
war in South Vietnam, known as the Central Office for South Vietnam, or COSVN.
The Cambodian sanctuaries had been made necessary in part by the heavy bombings
inside South Vietnam.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff had long urged the Johnson White House to divert
some of the B-52s: missions from South Vietnam to the Cambodian sanctuaries, but
without success. The political arguments against such bombing were obvious. The
United States was not at war with Cambodia, whose government was headed by
Prince Norodom Sihanouk. The official American position was one of respect for
Sihanouk's neutrality, as North Vietnam's was also. Sihanouk was engaged in a
diplomatic balancing act whose goal was to insulate his nation of seven million
from the Vietnam War. And, of course, there was the antiwar movement at home to
be considered.

The issue came up again a few days after the outgoing Johnson Administration
had finally resolved a series of procedural disputes with the North Vietnamese
in Paris, permitting the long-delayed peace talks to begin. On January ~ ~, the
day after Nixon's inauguration, both sides announced that the first Paris
plenary session would be held in four days. Nixon, shortly before taking office,
had let it be known that he favored the compromises in Paris.

The Pentagon chose that week, Nixon's first in office, to propose formally
that the bombing of North Vietnam be renewed. That was politically
impossible-which should have been obvious-and was rejected out of hand. In early
February 1969, the Pentagon tried anew: It told the White House that it had
received evidence from a North Vietnamese defector pinpointing the location of
COSVN. Kissinger was further assured, according to top-secret military documents
later declassified and released under the Freedom of Information Act, that "all
of our information, generally confirmed by imagery interpretation, provides us
with a firm basis for targeting COSVN hqs [headquarters]." The documents also
show that General Earle G. Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
endorsed a recommendation for a "short-duration, concentrated B-s2 attack" on
COSVN, in an effort to disrupt a North Vietnamese offensive that was correctly
believed to be imminent. Ellsworth Bunker, the American Ambassador in Saigon,
also endorsed the proposed mission.

Kissinger turned for advice to Richard L. Sneider, his National Security
Council aide for East Asia. Sneider was dubious. "It didn't make military
sense," he recalls. He had studied an earlier proposal to use B-52s: aircraft
against the North Vietnamese sanctuaries in Cambodia, and concluded then that
the bombing would disperse the North Vietnamese soldiers from border areas
farther west into Cambodia, thus putting more of Cambodia under Communist
control. Sneider had another reason, too, for his skepticism: "I knew we
wouldn't hit COSVN."

Alexander M. Haig, Jr., the Army colonel who was Kissinger's newly named
military aide, wanted the strikes and argued forcefully for them with Kissinger.
"Haig was the guy who pushed the goddamn thing," Sneider says. "Henry didn't
know what was going on in terms of military operations." One aspect of Haig's
qualifications was particularly impressive to his civilian colleagues: He
confided to a few that while serving in Vietnam he had participated in one of a
regular series of highly classified ground reconnaissance missions inside
Cambodia. The Americans who went on such missions, whose existence did not
become publicly known until ~973, wore specially manufactured replicas of North
Vietnamese uniforms and carried captured gear and weapons. They went in
"sterile," that is, without any identification or markings to indicate that they
were Americans-except, of course, their white or black skin, large body size,
and fluent knowledge of English.

No record has been found that Haig did in fact participate in such a mission.
Former junior officers who served in Haig's unit in South Vietnam and who
regularly went on cross-border operations had no knowledge that he or any other
field-grade officer took part. Haig's military record was exemplary without such
derring-do. Haig, forty-four years old, had served as deputy commandant at West
Point, a traditional stepping stone to high Army rank, before being assigned as
Kissinger's military assistant shortly before the inauguration. With every staff
stumble and change, Haig grew in importance to Kissinger. His most obvious
attributes were the most important ones for Kissinger: He was a no-argument,
"can-do" military man all the way, a hard-liner on Vietnam, the kind of man who
would appeal to Nixon and the White House staff.

In 1969, Haig seemed to be the consummate staff officer. An average student
at West Point-214th in a class of 310-he had graduated in 1947 and been assigned
to the American Army of Occupation in Japan, where he became a social aide on
the staff of General Douglas MacArthur's headquarters. In 1950, he married the
daughter of MacArthur's deputy chief of staff, to whom Haig was now
aide-de-camp. He won a Silver Star while serving, again as an aide-de-camp, in a
corps headquarters during the Korean War, where he participated in MacArthur's
landing at Inchon. After Korea, Haig continued on the upwardly mobile track,
attending the right Army schools and serving in the right staff jobs. In 1962,
after a tour as a staff officer of a tank battalion in Europe, he received a
master's degree in international relations from Georgetown University. His next
assignment was at the Pentagon, where he was selected over many other applicants
to become a staff aide to a Kennedy Administration task force on Cuba directed
by Cyrus Vance, then Secretary of the Army, and Joseph A. Califano, Jr., then
the Army's general counsel. He was, by all accounts, a superb assistant to Vance
and Califano: tireless and loyal, personable, and with a flair for organization.

It was at this stage in his career that Lieutenant Colonel Haig was exposed
to covert CIA operations. Pentagon documents show that he was assigned in June
1963 to serve as Califano's assistant on "all matters
pertaining to Cuba." At the time, the CIA and the military were in the midst of
an intense secret war, authorized by President Kennedy, to overthrow the
government of Fidel Castro. Haig was also officially designated to serve as the
Pentagon's representative on a highly classified unit known as the "Subcommittee
on Subversion" -whose basic target was obviously Cuba. In 1966 and 1967, as a
combat officer with the First Division in Vietnam, he won the Distinguished
Service Cross and became the youngest lieutenant colonel to serve as a brigade
commander. Now riding on the Army's fastest track, he left Vietnam for West
Point. After Nixon's election, Haig, by then a full colonel, was formally
recommended to Kissinger by the Army, and informally endorsed by many military
and civilian officials, including Califano and General Goodpaster.

From the beginning Haig was immensely popular with the young, bright, and
ambitious Kissinger crew. He was not viewed as an intellectual threat-his first
assignment was the routine task of preparing the President's daily intelligence
summary-and he struck most of his colleagues as open and self-effacing. He
laughed easily, held his gin well, and had a lively scatological wit.

None of the NSC members, in scores of interviews many years later, was quite
sure how Haig did it, but within months he had managed to become indispensable
to Henry Kissinger. His loyalty was astonishing; he worked seemingly all the
time-every day, every night, every weekend-insuring that the flow of documents
in and out of Kissinger's chaotic office was uninterrupted. He had access to the
vast flow of backchannel messages from Kissinger's office to American officials
throughout the world. He saw, as few other NSC staff people could, the
dimensions of the takeover that Kissinger and Nixon were trying to accomplish.
As an adroit bureaucrat, he knew that more power for Kissinger meant more power
for him. Along with his institutional loyalty, there was a personal one: He
understood that his relationship to Kissinger was as important to his career as
Kissinger's relationship to the President was to his. Haig was no minor-league
courtier himself; he had learned from his days as an aide-de-camp and in the
Pentagon the art of flattering a superior.

Like most senior military men, and like Henry Kissinger, Haig was a believer
in military force-especially in Vietnam-and saw the war as vital to American
credibility and world stability. He quickly expressed his views to his fellow
National Security Council staff members. Sometimes things got unpleasant.

Richard Moose, staff secretary for the National Security Council during most
of 1969, shared space with Haig and Eagleburger just
outside Kissinger's main office, in the White House basement; the rest of the
Council staff was across the street in the Executive Office Building. Before he
went to work for the Pentagon's Institute of Defense Analysis, and from there to
Walt Rostow's NSC, Moose, a native of Arkansas, had spent five months on the
staff of Senator J. William Fulbright, the Arkansas Democrat and Vietnam war
critic who was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee-and thus one
of Richard Nixon's instant enemies. Early in the administration, Moose
earnestly-and naively-wrote Kissinger a memorandum saying he had worked with
Fulbright and offering to use his relationship if needed. Kissinger, already
under siege because of the "moderates" on his staff, did not respond. A few
weeks later, Moose accidentally encountered Fulbright in the White House after a
presidential meeting. They chatted amiably. Haig walked by, saw them, and, as
Moose recalled later, "looked as if he'd seen the devil."

Things quickly became difficult for Moose in the small office. Eagleburger
shared the views of Haig, the hard-liner, who was aggressive and full of
certitude about Vietnam; Moose, critical of the war, was not. And so Haig moved
in on the unresisting Moose and was soon handling much of the daily document
flow. Moose was being cut out. "I soon came not to care," Moose says, "except I
did really." Within a few months Moose resigned, his NSC position swallowed up
by Haig. As Allen was for Kissinger, Moose was Haig's first victim.

Al Haig, always working, always loyal, soon began undermining others on the
NSC staff whose integrity and independence made them potential threats among
them Morton Halperin and Richard Sneider. The rest of the staff-ever sensitive
to bureaucratic pecking order-soon came to realize that Haig's aggressiveness
was being encouraged by his patron. For Kissinger, Haig's very presence in his
outer office served as a way of demonstrating to the senior military men in the
Pentagon and to the hawks in Congress and on the President's staff-even to
Richard Nixon-that Kissinger was reliable. "Haig was the guy Henry could point
to," as one former NSC staff man puts it, "and say, 'If I were a Harvard
liberal, a left-wing kook, would I have Al Haig working for me?' He was Henry's
insurance policy."

Haig was that, but there was much more. As Sneider recalls, "Haig moved in on
Henry and he moved in from the very beginning. First of all, he was Henry's
butler and his chauffeur. Henry never knew the kinds of perks that could be
arranged-private planes for trips to New York for dinner, limousines -and he
loved it. Haig was also very shrewd politically where Henry was naive. He was
advising Henry at first on how to handle Haldeman and Ehrlichman. When Henry had
to wear a white tie and tails for his first White House dinner, it was Haig who
went to Henry's house and helped him dress . . ."

Even more important, Sneider said, was Haig's understanding from the
beginning "that the fight for the soul of Henry Kissinger would be between the
civilians and military on the National Security Council staff-and that's why he
put the knife in the Foreign Service officers and that's why he was so
competitive with Mort Halperin."

Haig's authority and power on the NSC were to increase with each staff
defection and each crisis. Eventually he would accomplish the one thing
Kissinger found intolerable-a separate relationship with Richard Nixon-and the
two men would become bitter enemies. And eventually Kissinger would come to
realize that Alexander Haig was not Kissinger's Kissinger, as the newspapers
would later characterize him, but Haig's Haig.

In the early months, however, Haig's ambition was not yet a threat. Kissinger
was relying on his enthusiasm and his firmly expressed professional opinion that
the B-s2 bombing in Cambodia would succeed in destroying the Vietnamese
sanctuaries. The Joint Chiefs of Staff also urged the bombing, and, as Nixon and
Kissinger both explained in their memoirs, those urgings were given more weight
after Hanoi initiated a spring offensive throughout South Vietnam on February
22. Although the attacks were on a far less ambitious scale than the Tet
offensive the year before, Nixon's immediate instinct was to retaliate. He and
Kissinger believed the offensive, coming before the new administration had had
any substantive meetings with the North Vietnam delegation in Paris -and on the
day before the President was to depart for his ceremonial ten-day visit to
Europe-was deliberately timed to humiliate him...

p61
... Sixty B-52 aircraft would be sent on the mission. Twelve of them would drop
their bombs on legitimate targets inside South Vietnam; the others would be
bombing Cambodia.

Sitton's process was to become known as the dual reporting system. The B-52
pilots would be briefed en masse before their mission on targets that were in
South Vietnam-that is, the cover targets. After the normal briefing, some crews
would be taken aside and told that shortly before their bombing run they would
receive special instructions from a ground radar station inside South Vietnam.
The radar sites, using sophisticated computers, would in effect take over the
flying of the B-52s for the final moments, guiding them to their real targets
over Cambodia and computing the precise moment to drop the bombs. After the
mission, all the pilots and crews would return to their home base and debrief
the missions as if they had been over South Vietnam. Their successes and
failures would then be routinely reported in the Pentagon's secret command and
control system as having been in South Vietnam.

The small contingent of officers and men who worked inside the four ground
radar sites in South Vietnam were to be provided with top-secret target
instructions for the Cambodian bombings by special courier flights from Saigon
that arrived a few hours before each mission. The men on the ground knew
Cambodia was being bombed, but none of them reported that fact until the
Watergate investigations of ~973. The men had no illusions about why the secrecy
was necessary. Hal Knight, Jr., of Memphis, Tennessee, was the first to talk.
Knight, who resigned from the Air Force as a captain in 1972, after being passed
over for promotion twice, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in July 1973
that he had believed the bombings were being kept secret to hide them from the
American public and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. There was another
concern, too, Knight said: "The thing that disturbs me a little bit is the fact
that at least once, if I had had a nervous breakdown . . . I could have gone to
a typewriter, picked me out a town, say, within a reasonable distance of the
actual aiming point, changed the coordinates of the aiming point to those of
that town . . . and no one would have known the difference."

The final reporting process, as approved by the National Security Council,
flew in the face of a basic military principle. "We were all trained to the idea
that those reports were just pretty near sacred," Knight testified, "and that
falsifying a report could result in the gravest disciplinary action against the
person who did it." Knight did not add in his testimony that he and his
colleagues had been trained to deal with B-52 missions involving the basic
mission of the Strategic Air Command-the carrying of nuclear weapons. Nixon and
Kissinger were casually tampering with the command and control system of
America's nuclear deterrent, a system necessarily under constant high-level
analysis to prevent accidents or unauthorized nuclear bombings.

Sitton's plan, as approved by Kissinger and Haig, included elaborate
precautions in case reporters in Saigon or Washington began asking questions
about the missions over Cambodia. If that should happen, they were to be told by
a press spokesman that, yes, B-52s did strike on routine missions in South
Vietnam adjacent to the Cambodian border. The spokesman, wrote Sitton, was to
"state that he has no details and will look into this question. Should the press
persist in its inquiries or in the event of a Cambodian protest concerning U.S.
strikes in Cambodia, U.S. spokesmen will neither confirm nor deny reports of
attacks on Cambodia but state it will be investigated. After delivering a reply
to any Cambodian protest, Washington will inform the press that we have
apologized and offered compensation."

Sitton was ordered to draft the initial set of press guidelines-and all
subsequent guidelines for dealing with the press during the clandestine
bombing-m the most secure manner possible. Only a few men inside the
Pentagon-including the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and
Sitton's two immediate superiors-were to know what the White House was doing.
Any paperwork in connection with the bombing was to be hand carried by Sitton to
his superiors; nothing was to be put into the normal lines of communication.

Nixon and Kissinger wanted the bombing, but they preferred to bomb with the
concurrence of Laird and Rogers. By mid-March, Laird had been brought around,
although he still had reservations about the secrecy aspect, but Rogers was
still opposed.

On March 15, Nixon formally authorized the Joint Chiefs to schedule the
attack for March 18. Neither Rogers nor Laird was told that the command order
had been given. The next step was to concoct an Oval Office meeting for Rogers
and Laird. As Kissinger recalled it, the March 18 meeting "followed predictable
lines." Laird and General Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
advocated the bombing; Rogers objected on the ground that it would create
domestic turmoil. Kissinger's revealing account continues: "There were several
hours of discussion during which Nixon permitted himself to be persuaded by
Laird and Wheeler to do what he had already ordered. Having previously submitted
my thoughts in a memorandum, I did not speak."

Two days later Kissinger was talking with Halperin when Haig broke in and
handed Kissinger a cable. Kissinger smiled. The first raids on Cambodia had gone
without a hitch and the crew members, in their initial debriefings, reported
seventy-three secondary explosions, some as much as five times the normal
intensity. Vietcong headquarters, with its presumably vast stores of munitions,
must have been hit. Kissinger expansively shared the report with Halperin and
then sternly warned him that the bombing of Cambodia was a vital secret that
they had to protect; only a very few people knew

Kissinger did not report in his memoirs that the initial report of numerous
secondary explosions, like so many of the reports official Washington received
from the battlefield during the Vietnam War, was exaggerated. Those first raids
did not, in fact, accomplish their basic mission-the destruction of COSVN. And
within hours that failure cost American and South Vietnamese lives.

On the same day Kissinger was sharing his secret with Halperin, a Special
Forces group, twelve thousand miles from the White House basement, also learned
for the first time of the B-52 attacks. The men, operating out of a makeshift
base near the Cambodian-South Vietnamese border, were told that they were going
to be inserted by helicopter into the COSVN area right after the bombing raids,
literally before the dust and smoke had a chance to settle. Two members of the
reconnaissance unit were Americans; the rest were specially trained South
Vietnamese soldiers. Listening excitedly was Randolph Harrison, a Green Beret
lieutenant who was not scheduled for the mission. He and his fellow officers had
long urged using B-52 strikes to destroy the North Vietnamese sanctuaries, and
he recalls the briefing vividly: "We were told that we would go in and pick some
of these guys [COSVN personnel] up. If there was anybody still alive out there
they would be so stunned that all you will have to do is walk over and lead him
by the arm to the helicopter. This is what they told us. We had no reason to
doubt this. . . We had been told that B-52 strikes will annihilate anyone down
there."

Moments after the bombing, the helicopter rolled over the still-smoking bomb
site and unloaded the thirteen-man reconnaissance team. There was instant
carnage. "The visible effect [of the B-52 bombing] on the North Vietnamese who
were there was the same as taking a beehive the size of a basketball and poking
it with a stick," Harrison says. "They were mad." Only four members of the team
lived long enough to find cover in the woods. "I'm sure there are instances
wherein tremendous damage has been done by B-52s," Harrison says. "But my
original enthusiasm has been tempered somewhat."

There was an order from military headquarters in Saigon to insert a second
Green Beret team that morning, he recalls. No one wanted to go. "They said,
'Fuck you.' " The second mission did not take place.

There is no evidence that the Pentagon informed the White House of the
slaughter of the intelligence team in the jungles of Cambodia. Neither Kissinger
nor Nixon mentions the deaths in his memoirs. There was White House concern,
however, about the failure to knock out COSVN. Richard Sneider think Haig may
have been embarrassed by the lack of results, but he was among those urgently
recommending a second attempt on COSVN. "The military kept on saying, 'We'll get
it next time,' " Sneider says. Colonel Sitton recalls hearing right away that
the reconnaissance team had been "shot up." It caused him no undue worry. "We
weren't surprised. It was a complete and total headquarters," he said of COSVN.
"The more bombs we laid on it, the more we learned how big it was. We could find
air vents sticking up above ground but couldn't tell which way they were going
underground."

Such accounts of the size and permanence of COSVN emplacements would have
amazed North Vietnam's leaders in Hanoi. They had issued orders early in the war
that COSVN was never to stay in one place for more than ten days. The enemy
headquarters moved constantly throughout the war, constantly managing to leave a
false trail for American intelligence. COSVN was never destroyed.

Nevertheless, the White House did not seem to consider the March ~8 attack on
COSVN a military failure. In his memoirs, Kissinger insisted that the bombing
was kept secret solely for diplomatic and military reasons: "[A] public
announcement [would have been] a gratuitous blow to the Cambodian government,
which might have forced its demand that we stop; it might have encouraged a
North Vietnamese retaliation (since how could they fail to react if we had
announced we were doing it?)." If the bombing had been made public, Kissinger
added, "It would surely have been supported by the American public." Richard
Nixon was more honest. There was concern about Prince Sihanouk's position, he
wrote in RN, but "Another reason for secrecy was the problem of domestic antiwar
protest. My administration was only two months old, and I wanted to provoke as
little public outcry as possible at the outset."

Within the next few months, the secret bombing of Cambodia would become far
more intense, and Colonel Sitton would be rewarded for his work with a promotion
to brigadier general; later he would become a lieutenant general, the
second-highest rank in the Air Force.

Sitton had been promoted for helping to institute a policy that would enable
a few men, operating without written instructions, to change the flight path and
bombing patterns of a Strategic Air Command bomber. In his view, he had been a
good officer, carrying out orders that he knew had come from the very top of the
government: "My job was picking the right target and putting the bombs there. If
the government chooses to bomb in secret, that's a political decision."

Over a fourteen-month period, ending in April 1970, Nixon and Kissinger
authorized a total of 3,630 flights over Cambodia; by the Pentagon's count, the
planes dropped 110,000 tons of bombs.

In 1973, when the full story of the secret B-s2 bombings became known,
Kissinger was among the first to condemn the fact that the bombs were officially
reported to have fallen not on Cambodia but on South Vietnam. Speaking at the
height of the outcry over Watergate, Kissinger told the author, then a reporter
in Washington for the New York Times, that the White House "neither ordered nor
was it aware of any falsification of records" of the bombing. He added that the
White House had begun its own investigation into the official mishandling of the
records. "I think it's deplorable," he said.